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Tuesday, June 2, 2015

Destructive Adoration

I’ve spent months trying not to write this blog. But the
news won’t let go and the issue won’t leave me alone. So now, the least popular
blog I will ever write.

I need to write about Bruce Jenner.

See, as a person who appreciates science and logic, I’m
confused.

As the husband of an amazing wife and father of three wonderful
daughters, I'm offended for them.

And as a person who empathizes with the pain of others, I
hurt for Bruce Jenner.

On the science front, this is just the latest example of
our culture’s inability to handle basic science. It seems, in the same way we
decided there’s no such thing as absolute moral truth, we’re now saying there
is no such thing as absolute scientific truth if that truth doesn’t fit with
our agenda. Whether it’s true nutritional science, medical science, or
genetics, if the science doesn’t fit with our agenda, we say the science is
wrong. No matter the conclusiveness of every study.

Scientific fact: Jenner is a man. It’s not about the way
he dresses, it’s about every gene in his body. When they finished the mani-pedi
and hair styling that went into the Vanity Fair photoshoot, if you’d gathered
up all the hair and nail clippings, and sent samples to DNA labs all over the
country, each would have concluded without any doubt that the contributions
came from a man. That pesky Y chromosome just won’t go away, no matter how many
hormones we pump in, how much mascara we apply, how much we wish it wasn’t so.

Our anti-science bias met its match when Jenner pointed
out to an interviewer that he was still attracted exclusively to women. “Does
that mean you’re a lesbian?” the interviewer replied. And because we want to
ignore the basic facts of science, very few people even caught the irony.

Which leads me to the women in my life and how I am
offended for them. To make this one simpler to understand, let’s say that
instead of saying he was really a women trapped in a man’s body, what if Jenner
had said he was really an African-American trapped in a Caucasian body? Hey, I’m possibly the whitest
man in America, and I would have been offended.

Being African American is about a whole lot more than
skin color and hair style and cultural preferences. It’s about how people look
at you when you walk down a street at night. About what goes through your mind
when you see blue lights in your rear-view mirror. About how you are viewed by
others every moment of every day, knowing you’ve been viewed that way your
entire life, and will be viewed that way every day for the rest of your life.
Knowing that if you succeed in many venues, some will say it was because of
special privileges granted because of your race while you’ll know it was
probably accomplished in spite of your race.

Now let’s add in the female components. Being a woman
means your body—and your life—has run on a calendar since you were a pre-teen.
It means you are rarely the most powerful person in the room, either in terms
of physical or perceived power. It means that you have to work harder to be
taken seriously, speak louder to be heard, and be exposed to standards no man
has to deal with. I’ve yet to hear any discussion of the clothing choices of
the male presidential candidates. Hillary’s pant suits, on the other hand…

I read a blog once that said if life was a video game,
the “Easy” setting would be titled “Heterosexual White Male.” And now we’ve got
the white Olympic decathlon champion, a person who has normally been the most
physically powerful person in every room he’s entered, saying he truly understands
what it means to be a woman.

If our culture wasn’t so ironically impaired, we might
point out that the same week Jenner hit Vanity Fair, every female who entered
the Army’s Ranger course failed to complete it, and The New York Times called
for the WNBA to lower the basketball hoop. “Female athletes deserve a chance to
really soar,” the Times proclaimed. Meanwhile, on USAToday.com, the main ad on
the article about women failing the Ranger program is a picture of the former
World’s Greatest Athlete smiling in lingerie.

Which brings me to my biggest problem, what we as a
society are doing to Jenner and other people like him. This is a hurting
person. He is hurt deeply and has obviously been hurting for a long, long time.
But like many people he is trying to solve emotional (or maybe even dare-I-say
spiritual) pain with a physical “solution.” And it’s not going to work.

If you don’t believe me, just look. Jenner has been
trying to salve this pain with physical transition for years. That nose is not
the nose he had in 1976, and I doubt there’s been just one surgery. Make-up and
hormones and a new wardrobe aren’t going to help long-term any more than the
surgeries.

But unfortunately for Jenner, our culture has decided
that his issue, his pain, should be lumped in with sexual orientation, so
whatever the person says is true. Even if it is verifiably not.

So Jenner puts make-up on his real pain, we cheer and
call him brave, and I wonder what he’ll do when this latest physical attempt to
solve an emotional/spiritual problem doesn’t work.